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A game I’ve not seen mentioned on the forums really (and now it’s aging somewhat) is Motorsport Manager. If you like car sports it’s a great pick up. You’ll manage everything from building up your HQ and assorted buildings, upgrading your factory, etc. You can even build a road car factory to provide you with a bunch of cash each race. It’s all rendered in 3D with different states for the buildings and stuff, pretty to look at it. You’ll also be in charge of hiring mechanics, drivers, designers. Picking suppliers for your car and working on a strategy for upgrading. You can even build illegal parts and hope to not get caught. You play as a character, so you can be fired and/or get jobs with a new race team with a whole new set of stuff. And most obviously, you’re the Race Principle. (For non Motorsport people: the guy who manages strategy for the race.) You have to help tune the cars for the track in practice, then set tire and pit stop strategies throughout the race. It’s got wet weather, part degradation, safety cars, the whole bit. For something I was worried might be a phone game it almost perfectly hits the level of depth I wanted and has very pretty races to watch, all 3D rendered. It’s extremely chill and let’s you pause at any time if you really want to drill into a strategy decision or anything. I’ve put a bunch of hours into it and worked my way up to “F1” from the lowest rung and still find new challenges now and then, though after a campaign this long it does tend to get rote on certain courses. TLDR: Motorsport Manager is good and relatively unknown. If you like Motorsports, buy it.
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Jan 7, 2020 17:09
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 21:15 |
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I can honestly say it’s one of the few games that’s made me stand up and cheer like watching a real sports event when my virtual car man passes the other virtual car man right at the checkered flag.
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Jan 7, 2020 19:47
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Yeah I rely pretty heavily on a datamined tire mechanics guide because there’s a lot they don’t explicitly tell you in the numbers, and even then I have so many unknowns I’m still experimenting. For example, some tires run bad, but not “off the cliff” laps down to 0%. Ultras hit a cliff at 20%. Why they wouldn’t just make the cliff consistent in the arbitrary % graph is beyond me. I know that running tires overheated loses the flat time improvement of running high/attack on tires, but does it still make my guy take a more aggressive line? (It seems like it does.) Is running ultras on conserve faster than running super softs on aggressive? How many “speed stars” is a driving style worth? I guess it’s good that *some* of that’s opaque because it makes it more of a game and less of an equation to solve, but for something like motorsports I always want more data. It doesn’t help that a ton of guides and googled answers don’t give reliable information as a lot of people answer with how they think things work which just isn’t true. (Don’t listen to the guy telling you to not push your tires on lap 1, you’ll fall behind the field and bleed way more time than catching a few spots and being able to defend later in the stint.)
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Jan 7, 2020 19:58
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Woah what? Are they anything like the first?
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Jan 7, 2020 20:26
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I’m a giant glutton for these games so I’m pretty well tuned in but yeah, I’ve even spotted a few I didn’t know about. Good thread. It’s by and away my favorite genre and it doesn’t get a lot of “mainstream” attention beyond AAA offerings like Planet Zoo, and even then just briefly.
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Jan 7, 2020 21:34
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If anyone wants help with Motorsport Manager PM me and I can share my discord. That said, it is pretty niche so at the same time I get that if you aren’t already a giant goon about racecraft it might still be hard to enjoy. e: and full disclosure I am as long winded in person as posting.
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Jan 7, 2020 23:42
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Surviving Mars hit a weird spot with me too where it’s everything I love but I just kind of put it down. I should try to go back with the terraforming dlc. I kind of sputtered when I got to “super late game” and wanted to keep building but it got a bit samey looking and rote.
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Jan 8, 2020 07:39
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Yeah it looks like the PC version might arguably be more “full featured” beyond graphics than the mobile 3rd installment, but I didn’t do a huge amount of research. It looks like the actual race principle gameplay is essentially the same. The best way I can sum up pitting: if you absolutely need fuel or tires or both. If rules change in that version you need to be aware of your fuel rule for the series. If your series doesn’t have refueling (car starts with enough fuel for the race) you just need to plan on tires and manage fuel with engine modes. If it does have refueling, it depends on the rule when you want to pit and may be set up much more for only fueling for your stint. This might drive tire choice to match fuel levels. Even still you’ll generally rely more on tire choice to drive when to pit. Tires; you basically want to choose for a 1 or 2 pit strategy and you want the softest tire that completes that strategy. The actual math of what strategy is best and when exactly to put is really the soul of the racecraft in the game, though, so other than speaking in generalities like that it’s hard to say exactly when to pit. I’ve found the most luck recently on the one pit mid compound tires, but that’s a function of my current car and team and the series rules. Remember that your best laps are front loaded and next best are in the middle - don’t ride tires into bad laps if you’re going to miss good ones on the later tires if the race ends. Also at least in 1, a lot of the “20-25 laps” indicators are outright lies considering I’ve been at the cliff and it’s said “1-3 laps”. Give yourself a buffer. A big tip: At least in MSM1 you can really exploit the AI around wet and intermediate tires. A lot of times they’ll push an extra lap or two into a bad state with the wrong tires on wet or drying tracks and you can make up huge advantages. I had a race recently where the AI started on inters even though the track was dry for four laps and good for drys for 5-6. I was the only team out on the softest compound and got a good 30s+ lead which more than made up for my lap 5 pit, and then I was 5 laps ahead of them in tire wear.
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Jan 8, 2020 21:21
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Wear is a function of temp, track, and driving style. (Also car, but that’s season determined by your build.) As far as I can gather, there are two temps you want to avoid and that’s just min and max. I haven’t experimented extensively to see if there’s really any difference in the middle of the zone. Being at min or max increases the wear (min much less, but still present.) At both, also, your tires under perform. (Jury is still out though because I feel like in situations where you don’t care about wear anymore, Attack still provides faster laps than normal at an appropriate temp. Anecdotal, though.) Basically the “this tire is good for x laps” assumes a standard driving style for 100% of the laps. Generally, I run high/attack the first couple laps on new tires to really squeeze out time, which decreases the total laps available to the tire. The track tire wear rate is more or less totally baked into that “good for x-y laps” number so it’s not super useful, but still handy to know as it can push you to different strats. Ambient temp is a huge thing - in Doha and Phoenix, attack will overheat a 1/4 hot tire in like a lap and a half, on near freezing tracks it can take like 3 or more to overheat. This is important because if you go with a 1 pit strategy on say a 50 lap race and your tires are rated for like 26 laps, you might end up eating extra laps of wear being aggressive to push the tire temps above minimum. Softer tires naturally heat faster so require less pounding on to get warm. The big question I can’t answer (and I’ve been too lazy to test with control) is if it’s faster to run the soft compound on Conserve or the middle compound on Normal. I think the reason this is hard to answer is because it’s a hugely multi variable answer that’s not always the same, but there are a lot of situations where the soft compound runs really hot on a track, but I can still execute a 1 stop strategy because of the course tire wear. As for general futzing - you should almost never use the lowest two buttons except for safety cars. If you’re using the low engine (yellow) mode you’ve either screwed up fuel at your stop (or on a no refuel rule) or are reaallly trying not to break a nearly broken part. Overtake (1.35 laps fuel/lap) is great for the first couple laps. Time on those laps is worth a lot more than you think. After that it’s situational. On my current rules with a reliable car, I use it my entire first stint, but then sometimes not. Helps to watch what other cars are doing here. (Don’t blow your lead in fueling during a pit.) High (Orange, 1.1 laps of fuel/lap, I think?) is my most used mode. Tires is almost 100% about managing temp unless you’re trying to eke our extra laps from them or in weird spots where you want to push hard at the beginning or end of a stint. Just make them go as fast as they can without blowing your temp. If they cool at yellow and heat on orange, I’ll run two yellow to one orange or whatever that’s balanced. Again the big caveat that really all or at least most of this is situational and weird situations pop up constantly that can make you want to break these rules. Weather, safety cars, whatever. That’s the meat of racecraft though. In fact, the races I dread after tons of hours in the game are ones like Dubai or Phoenix where there’s no weather or rarely crashes and it pretty much demands a single strategy and just comes down to your top speed on a straight.
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Jan 8, 2020 22:35
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It’s really cool and while I tangentially enjoyed fast cars before the game, it launched me into being an all out vroomsports fan. Combine it with F1: Drive to Survive on Netflix for maximum effect.
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Jan 9, 2020 01:22
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So apparently Surviving the Aftermath is by the same devs? I almost missed it. Anyone played it? Any fun?
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Jan 10, 2020 21:31
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Mayveena posted:Not the same devs. Surviving Mars is by the Tropico devs who have moved on. It's not bad, it's incomplete though, in EA. Oh okay. I misunderstood because I thought they stayed with Paradox, publishing Surviving the Aftermath.
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Jan 10, 2020 21:57
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A joke youtube is Let’s Game It Out and he mostly plays management games and horribly breaks them in some way. He’s kinda funny, but I actually find them interesting because of the creative way he breaks things sometimes.
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Jan 11, 2020 16:14
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I think I mentioned it previously, but if you haven’t played into the late 1800’s/1900’s, you’ll probably want to leave room for 4 tracks. (Both directions for cargo and passengers.) Passenger trains rapidly outpace rolling stock and running both on the same tracks (once things get busy, at least) will throttle your network. I hadn’t realized that my first play through and while it wasn’t awful to expand, there were absolutely a few spots I’d have left more room. Track is also really cheap once you’re making good money. Also are intracity passenger lines like busses or streetcars pretty much a loss leader for passenger train networks? I’ve never made more than pennies on those routes, but mine might just suck.
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Jan 13, 2020 18:26
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Yeah I was whole hog into Graveyard Keeper until I wasn’t. It’s weird that the game can come so close to exciting and awesome, right in my favorite genre, and then veer strongly off course once you realize you’ve seen all it has to show and it’s not going to get better.
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Jan 24, 2020 17:16
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“Early Access” is just “Games as a Service” but for Indie devs.
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Jan 27, 2020 15:23
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I mean sure, but there’s more than a handful of games in early access that are more or less full experiences but still retain the title because the dev plans on adding major features that might change existing content.
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Jan 27, 2020 15:37
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Just use the Psychology mod that includes a basic Kinsey scale for all pawns.
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Feb 1, 2020 18:10
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John Lee posted:These two posts near each other hosed me up briefly. Amazing.
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Feb 3, 2020 08:25
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Tropico also doesn’t do a great job of communism because money is such a core mechanic. Making free rent basically turns your pop into a giant money bag that, unless you get the Taj Mahal, sucks your treasury dry unless you’re making exorbitant amounts of money. I’ve never had success trying to keep people cash poor while also offering great benefits, because wage is directly tied to job quality. My only truly successful games are basically liberal welfare states. Related, I wish Workers and Resources wasn’t just SO janky.
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Feb 5, 2020 16:15
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I really want Saelig to fill that hole because I couldn’t break into the relative age and jank of The Guild 2, but it doesn’t look like it’s there yet. Has anyone played it? Unrelated, I picked up Foundation when it was on sale a week ago or so. It’s cute, but the housing zone where the AI get to place the houses themselves is really a deal breaker. I’m already fastidious about making things both look good and be efficient, this flies in the face of that and also really doesn’t work well. Unless you micromanage the desirability of a zone to sort of draw the houses close to each other, they can really mess up and build houses where it leaves super awkward spaces that they then can’t build in despite looking like the right size. I want to like it, but it needs a lot of love to step up to the level of something like Banished.
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Feb 11, 2020 00:17
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That’s where I’m at Mayveena. It has a charm, but the “innovations” don’t make me want to play it over any other similar game.
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Feb 11, 2020 01:30
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That looks really cool and I hope it delivers. Right up my alley - I love base building/management/survival, but still first person. Games like satisfactory and 7 Days to Die (less management, admittedly) really help you get into the scale and immersion of your projects.
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Feb 12, 2020 18:52
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There seems to be a flood of games in that vein recently - kind of that small/medium business management that’s roughly inspired by something like Kairosoft’s game dev studio. That, or I’m just noticing it more. Youtuber Life, Esports team manager, etc. little big workshop seems like it breaks that model a little though. A lot of those I can’t ever break into because they don’t allow for a lot of creativity or sort of “zen garden” creativity. It’s why after awhile I burn out on Anno despite it being mechanically superior to say, Cities Skylines or Tropico. Anno requires a lot more operational design that often sacrifices aesthetics when you really need to pound out extra efficiency. I like to decorate and beautify. The current game that hits the perfect blend of operational and aesthetic design for me is Airport CEO. (If you were like me and debated Sim Airport or Airport CEO, Airport CEO is the far superior product.)
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Feb 19, 2020 20:43
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WithoutTheFezOn posted:How’s the progress on its development (Airport CEO)? Looks like it’s been EA since 2017? I only just picked it up so I don’t have a good feeling for how long it took to get where it is, but it’s absolutely a more complete product than Sim airport. It has a lot of turnaround services and I can make a realistic looking airfield that also works well in practice without being wasteful. Some things are kind of binary - including some turnaround services - but they do a great job for the “ant farm” effect of watching your trucks service the field. Design all follows pretty logically with some weird first time “gotchas” of not understanding how things link up. My terminals look like terminals, and they’re adding more cosmetics in the next patch. Shops and restaurants are annoying and same-y, but exist. Security is basically security theatre (so a highly realistic simulation.  ) The baggage systems are complex enough to be enjoyable.On the more business/ops side, nothing is incredibly deep but it all works together well. Staff have skills and perform better/worse on shift length and that. Flights are scheduled by time at gate and not time in/out (creates a much more realistic system for early or delayed flights than Sim Airport.) e: I should note that the runway behavior is a little gamey, if you’re a super stickler for realism. (I could go on about how in any of these games I build like I have real runway requirements and refuse to build the terminal in the flight path, etc.) I sure would like even more cosmetics, but slapping field lights airside and street lights on your roads and lots is cool. It sparks that “field of a million lights” airport look in my brain. There’s absolutely some really annoying bugs that can crop up, but I haven’t run into any show stoppers. The next patch intends to add passport control, separate boarding/deboarding zones at gates, more cosmetics and some other light changes. Ultimately it’s not the brightest star of the management/tycoon genre, but if you think you want the game because you like building and you like airports, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. So long as you’re willing to figure through things that should have a help button or tutorial but don’t and occasional jank. Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Feb 19, 2020 |
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Feb 19, 2020 22:09
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I have it. Not really. It’s so early still and very janky. Honestly it’s a toss up between which is better, between Ostriv and Foundation imo. It has some cool ideas but I don’t think it’ll ever be “pretty good” in a reasonable time frame unless you absolutely desire to order around Ukrainian peasants.
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Mar 3, 2020 22:03
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Workers and Resources is the superior Ukraine simulator but instead of a genocide you build everyone nice stores and theaters. Speaking of janky poo poo, I really desperately want to like W&R as it does a lot of unique things and has cool ideas but my god is it jank ridden.
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Mar 4, 2020 07:07
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Looks good, but for pure modern city building I’m hard pressed to give up the Skylines eye candy.
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Mar 6, 2020 17:38
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While I totally understand why people love 1404->1800, I feel like a like hold out for the direction they went with 2205. I think it really captured what I like about Anno and I love the setting, I just wish it had some of the QOL improvements and systems of 1800.
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Mar 29, 2020 07:34
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Foundation: I loved all four to five hours I could squeeze out of it before I literally saw all there was to see. That’s maybe being a little unfair to it, but in its current state I couldn’t say it has legs for more than a weekend unless something about the creative side of it really grabs you - and even then it’s a bit light on the amount of decorating and beautifying you can really do, especially since residential places itself. I ultimately think they’re going to have to kill or heavily modify that feature if they want it to succeed. I was intrigued by it but it’s such a pain in the rear end a lot of the time right now that it makes it hard to enjoy the idea of organic growth. Any suggestion I have that tries to improve the feature but maintain the organic growth aspect ends up boiling down to “just give the player more control over house placement” so I can’t help but think that’s got to be the move. I think the game has a great style and approach in many ways and maybe they can make the house placement less spotty. If they can do that and keep up a good pace of patches, it would be a good recommendation.
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Apr 2, 2020 06:24
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I was excited for that from the general aesthetics but I’m a little cooler on it having seen the gameplay, finally. It looks a lot, lot heavier on the “build practical machines and layouts” side of things. It doesn’t look like it’ll have much of the bonsai garden creative sort of building. I enjoy both, but a healthy balance is where the fun is at for me. I’ll probably still pick it up though!
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Apr 7, 2020 00:01
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If you want to know about Motorsport Manager, I am willing to talk your ear off about every dumb bit of minutia about it. I have way too many hours in the game and despite never having looked deep under the hood at the formulas the game uses I swear I can see that game like Matrix code. It’s a great game and it’s a shame that all of the sequels were mobile and also objectively simpler (worse, imo) games.
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Apr 10, 2020 07:01
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A lot of what you need to do changes heavily with the rules of your championship. Luckily by the time I got my team into World championship the quali rounds were just normal sessions and not the F1 three rounder. I eventually got to a point where I was letting the AI play the tire heating game, and most of my job was just to make sure they got out of the pits with no traffic. Sometimes you need to play a weather/dry track game, which is mostly just counting backwards from when the track will be dry to make sure you hit the window on your hot lap. I should do a big effort post about a full race and my strategy and all that, maybe I will if I can get up the energy.
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Apr 10, 2020 15:53
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Surviving the Aftermath does some cool things with the world map and has some good ideas, but it’s a little feature/content light because of EA. I’m torn on whether I would recommend it just based on the bang-for-your-buck ratio.
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Apr 14, 2020 12:49
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I bought it too because I’m a sucker for anything in the genre but honestly I’m bouncing pretty hard off of Industries of Titan. It really doesn’t have the scale or art style to support anything creative. It’s a very cool, elaborate puzzle game, but that’s all I can see it as. Everything’s too abstracted and weirdly scaled to hold me.
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Apr 15, 2020 22:43
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I assume that’s got to be true, mostly because people are waiting at a specific platform for a train and while I’m not familiar with rolling stock infrastructure, I assume that you have specific logistics assets staged at a platform where you expect a certain shipment.
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May 6, 2020 16:39
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Mayveena posted:Hmmm, they just introduced Dang it. I can’t wait to fight through it’s horrible placement and UI again but this game can’t keep me away. I didn’t realize they added ships, too!
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May 7, 2020 19:29
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You know, it was too subtle for me before but in retrospect the “load balance everything” approach of satisfactory and others is what I like, and is why factorio and other similar management games that benefit from that style of “build more” don’t click as well.
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May 8, 2020 02:08
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1800 and 2205 are very different games that share some common base mechanics. I’m still slightly partial to 2205’s style, but 1800 is a more in dept and complete execution of what it’s trying to be.
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May 13, 2020 01:17
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 21:15 |
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I need to give prison architect another shot. It’s the first game I remember that has the “sell and use the money for NG+” which is my absolute favorite for management/buildy games. My play style is heavily “learn, then scrap and start over with a clean sheet” so that mechanic is absolutely ideal for me. It being a prison is always a bummer to me - I like when my success is more tied to my little dudes’ happiness as opposed to incarceration, but it’s such a solid game in the genre otherwise. - Unrelated, don’t recall having seen it talked about here recently: Airport CEO just got a big update that adds international fight handling, multiple terminal handling, and a lot of other minor features that for me, greatly improved my QOL being an aviation nerd. It’s very much a game where once you understand the tricks of each system they’re hard to screw up and you just print money, but it’s got an amazing “ant farm” feel and a pretty decent level of creative decoration without being over the top with a “pause and decorate an area for four hours” thing that turns me off from games like Planet Zoo. This is probably helped by the fact that airports are mostly boring, functional spaces. I would say if you aren’t predisposed to wanting to build an airport, it’s probably less good, but if you’re on the fence and an aviation nerd it’s a must have. I haven’t played SimAirport in years now, and while I like it’s approach in some ways, I think CEO hits more closely at encompassing the feeling of a bustling airport. Also be forewarned, it’s pretty decent on the stable branch but not without some really weird bugs. I’ve only had some really tough to handle bugs extremely infrequently, but plenty of annoyances crop up now and then. Save often!
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May 17, 2020 08:55
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